Go Green Half Marathon: A Race Report

I initially signed up for this race earlier this year with the goal of it being a PR race. Which would mean beating my time from the Mermaid ½ Marathon in May of 2008. My first 5 weeks of training went well---I did every workout on the race plan I found in Women’s Running Magazine.

And then life happened.

I got sick. I had some late nights/weekends at work. Bravo started airing two rounds of Real Housewives (Andy Cohen, you are killing me!). I was finding running very challenging in that it felt like I was running through tar. My legs just couldn’t speed up.

I had a heart to heart with Coach Heidi and told her about my issues and how this race was not going to be a PR race, and I will treat it like a benchmark. She also said because of my past experiences (bike crash at Barb’s triathlon, knee dislocation baking cookies) she saw that I was losing confidence in my body. So she had a crazy idea. She wanted me to do yoga 2-3 times a week for a month.

Yoga? Me? Say what?!

I am not a yoga kind of girl. In college I probably would have gravitated towards it because I had a, “Oh the pretty flowers, meat is murder, everyone is beautiful” hippy dippy attitude, which has faded significantly over the years. But then, Heidi knows best. Plus yoga clothes are pretty cute.

I scanned the Club One schedule of classes to find a yoga class that worked with my schedule. I went to my first class Hatha Yoga a couple weeks ago. Holy cow! Can we say “challenging?” We did crazy poses, some people did headstands, and the instructor kept coming over to comment on how tight my hips were (hello! That is why I am here). It didn’t help that there was a Zumba class next door and I could hear Salt n’ Pepa’s “Push It” in the background.

The instructor told me to not be frustrated and you just have to keep doing it. I took a deep breath, thinking to myself, “Just gotta do this for one month.”

So, I have been sticking to the yoga for the past couple weeks. My goal is to have the natural sitting pose feel, well, natural. We shall see.

Now, on to the race report. Since I didn’t train for this race, I figured one thing I could do was work on my pre-race routine. This basically meant, don’t do any of the things I did at the Las Vegas ½ marathon. So, I hydrated, ate sensibly, got a good night’s sleep (except for accidentally setting my clock two hours ahead instead of one the night before a race that was on the first day of daylight savings). It actually worked out well to have more time in the morning because I got to drink some coffee, have some cereal and watch my DVRed Saturday Night Live (Zach Galifinakis was HILARIOUS!)

The race started at 8am at Vasona Park in Los Gatos. I met my friend Lisa, who was looking super cute in her green plain running skirt (it was, after all, a St. Patrick’s themed race). I even did a warm-up run and stretch routine prior to the race. I was ready.

The race itself was ok. It was nice to run a race on a trail I was familiar with. One thing I worked on was trying to shut my mind off. So often when I run my mind is thinking ahead, sorting through problems, planning my grocery list. I wanted to focus on the right now of this race. Are my shoulders relaxed? Is my core engaged? I even practiced a technique I learned in the previous day’s yoga class—if there is a part of you that is tight, take a deep breath and exhale through that body part. Ok, I know that makes no sense, but it kind of worked (and I am kind of afraid I am going back to my hippy dippy ways). I purposefully left my Garmin at home as I knew looking at my mileage pace would drive me crazy. I wore this Disney Princess watch my 6-year-old niece left in my car last summer and vowed to not look at the time until mile 12.

So, my final time was far from a PR (31 minutes to be exact), but it was still 11 minutes faster than the Vegas race in November. So that is pretty cool.

Namaste.